Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to content management and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for collecting, merging, and presenting content.
Description of the Related Art
Currently, collecting, merging and presenting information from various applications and/or browsers into a single document suitable for display and printing requires cumbersome copy-paste operations or manually laying out of content. Generally, a user selects content from various web pages or other resources in order to collect pertinent information for a subject of interest. For example, if the user is gathering information for a trip, the user may navigate to different websites, news sources, on-line magazines, blogs, articles and the like. The user must copy and paste the desired content from each of these different resources into a single document. In addition, much of the selected content includes advertisements and/or other information not relevant to the user's subject of interest, such as headers and footers, and navigation links, which a user may want to have eliminated before printing a final document. Furthermore, because the information obtained from each of a plurality of unrelated sources is mostly likely formatted differently, the end result appears to be a haphazard collection of segregated objects copied into a single document rather than a single cohesive merged document which can be used for display and/or printing.
One conventional technique allows users to take “snapshots” of content from different application windows or browser pages. However, content collected this way cannot be edited. It may be scaled, but then the content loses fidelity. As a consequence, if the collected content contains text, the readability of the content decreases considerably when displayed and/or printed.
Another technique allows “soft-printing”, where the collected content is saved to a document. “Send to OneNote” is such a solution from MICROSOFT. The information is essentially static, and cannot be edited. This workflow is not very straightforward, and is cumbersome, involving multiple clicks.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and apparatus for collecting, merging, and presenting content in a cohesive document.